‘This is Denmark’s new waste-to-energy plant, which in Britain would be called an incinerator.’
Photograph: Bjarke Ingels Group

I was mooching through the centre of Copenhagen last week when my architect friend spotted two chimneys sticking from a sensuous steel building going up just across the water. This is Denmark’s new waste-to-energy plant, which in Britain would be called an incinerator.

The Danes are annoyingly incapable of designing anything horrible, and this vast factory, which will burn a quarter of all Denmark’s rubbish when it opens next year, is wrapped in a ski slope for the citizens of the capital. The chimneys will periodically emit huge rings of steam (not smoke) to elegantly demonstrate how much carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere by the plant – at one ring per tonne.

How about the world’s biggest funfair at Hinkley Point?

There are obvious concerns about waste-to-energy plants emitting toxic pollution and not encouraging us to reduce consumption, but the plant’s architect, Bjarke Ingels, hopes it will change our perception of “public utility” buildings. (Ingels is a hotshot. He’s in charge of this year’s Serpentine Gallery pavilion and is designing a “canyon” outside Battersea power station in London.)

The contrast with my bit of Britain is instructive. Norfolk county council recently squandered £30m on developing plans for an incinerator that public protests and government subsidy changes caused it to scrap. The council is now paying £68m over four years to ship waste from my home and every other in Norfolk to Germany and the Netherlands, where it will be burned.

Strolling past the ancient wood of Finemere in Buckinghamshire recently, I encountered a monstrous incinerator that began burning rubbish this spring. The only thing done to soothe outraged locals has been to paint it in green and grey stripes.

A ski slope and smoke rings might not convince us to love waste-to-energy – the practice of providing municipal heating via burning rubbish in Copenhagen is long established and relatively uncontroversial – but Ingels’s genius is to jolt us into demanding more from unpopular new public buildings. How about the world’s biggest funfair at Hinkley Point?

The riches of grey salt marsh

A visit to Scandinavia usually triggers a bout of very British self-loathing but one thing we’ve excelled at is saving our shores. Despite the occasional nuclear power station, we’ve turned much of our coast into contemporary common land via grassroots efforts and charities such as the National Trust (which now protects 775 miles of coast). Even governments have helped: the creation of an English coast path by 2020 could be the current and previous administrations’ most enduring positive legacy. The coast looks good. But it’s more than that. National Trust volunteers have conducted 24-hour “bioblitzes” – hunting for everything from oil beetles to otters – at 25 locations. They found the richest place for wildlife was not the stunning Cornish coast but a flat, grey salt marsh at Brancaster in Norfolk – an understated landscape that is teeming with 1,018 species of insect, plant, mammal and bird.

Tiny island ideals

I’m writing a book about small islands and wondering how small should I go. Tiny islands attract idealists and none more so than Roughs Tower, a fort built off Essex to repel a potential German invasion. Here, nearly 50 years ago, Major Roy Bates established his fiercely independent micro-kingdom of Sealand (motto: “From the Sea, Freedom”). “Prince” Roy died in 2012 and now Princess Joan of Sealand has passed away, aged 86. Another remarkable quality of small islanders is their longevity. So Sealand will thrive under the reign of their son, Prince Michael, for many years yet.